Highway Robbery Read Online Free PDF Page A

distraction. Candlelight leaked through the door and window frames, and wood-smoke spilled from chimneys. It seemed so unfair, sir, that I had no family to go to and no hearth to thaw my frozen toes.

    I thought about Dick Turpin and wondered where he was. Somewhere warm, no doubt. Spending his money and eating his fill, his high boots steaming before some hearty fire.

    The brief pat and a promise that he had given me began to feel like less of a privilege in the light of that understanding. Perhaps he wasn’t such a kind man if he was prepared to leave me in my bare feet in the coming darkness, with the ice on the mud puddles beginning to freeze over again.
    Or perhaps it was true, what they said about him. Perhaps he had tried to come and get Black Bess and give me my guinea, but he’d got a whiff of the dubbin on the soldiers’ boots and had turned away, smelling the trap we had laid for him.
    I was looking at a long night ahead of me in the bitter cold, and I began to wish that it had never been my misfortune to meet Dick Turpin and Black Bess.

C HAPTER T EN
    THEY CAME IN the night, sir, as I might have guessed they would, Toothless and his portly friend.
    I never saw or heard them coming at all. They just appeared, sneaking silently up the alley behind me.
    My first thought when I saw them was to take their thirty shillings and run. Even if the soldiers caught me, I’d be better off than I would standing there and perishing in the cold. But they never offered it this time. They just pushed me into the mud and made off with the horse.
    I’m not very big, sir, as you can see, but I can make a big noise if I choose to, and I did so then. The door of the nearest house opened, but I was already running after the men and Black Bess. I needn’t have, though. Because the soldiers had also appeared, as if from nowhere, and they were everywhere around us in the dark, blocking every mouth of every alley. The men tried to make a run for it, but they hadn’t a hope.

    They were collared in no time and brought back to my corner, and pushed against the wall. There was plenty of light by this time, because the commotion had caused half the people in the street to open their doors. And the other half, I suppose, to bolt them more securely.
    ‘But the horse is mine,’ Mudbreeks was saying. ‘That urchin stole her from me.’
    ‘Is that true, lad?’ said the captain, strolling in from one of the alleyways. ‘Is this the man who asked you to look after his horse?’
    I’m good at thinking on my feet, sir. You have to be if you live on your wits, like I do. But on that occasion I didn’t think fast enough. It could all have been over, yousee. If I had said yes, there could have been an end to it all.
    ‘But he promised me a guinea and now he has to give it to me’ is what I should have said. Muddybreeks would gladly have given me a guinea to get off the hook, and he would have got himself a great bargain. As for me, I could have taken myself off to the nearest pie shop and got myself a bellyful of steak and kidney.
    But there was an even better outcome to that particular plan, and it was this. If I named Muddybreeks as the owner of the horse, then the soldiers would stop watching for Dick Turpin, wouldn’t they? So when he did come back for Black Bess, he would be disappointed, of course, andhe would think that I had let him down, and that would be very unfortunate if it were to happen that I encountered him again some day. But what matters is that he would have his freedom, and he could go about his business on the highways. It was, in fact, the perfect solution to everyone’s problems.
    But did I say yes ?
    No. I said no .
    Two such small words, sir, but what a big difference between them. I said no, and the soldiers laid hands on the two men instantly, as if they were following my personal orders. Such a sense of power that gave me, but it didn’t last for long. Muddybreeches spat at me as they tookhim away, which